The story of the Graphic Studio Dublin is so riven with ego clashes and fallings out, it is remarkable that Ireland’s oldest printmakers’ collective survived to celebrate its 50th year. Part of those celebrations was the penning of a history, Ink-Stained Hands, by Brian Lalor, a studio member and its one-time chairman. His book is a beautiful production; the tale it tells is not so pretty.
A typical exchange between the studio manager James McCreary and the studio “leader” Mary Farl Powers at a members’ meeting in 1989 ran: “Mary wanted it put on record that she thinks James has had a very bad attitude towards his job for a long time now,” according to the minutes. James said Mary had been “harassing him and making his life a misery for years”. Both had joined the studio in 1973, bringing new energy to a group founded in 1960, and in the case of Powers, a confrontational attitude that was to taint the studio’s very personality for decades.
As Lalor puts it, with the arrival of Powers, the studio became “a battleground where the more combative spirits thrived, while less assertive individuals either remained on the periphery, left to join another studio, or abandoned printmaking”.
Lalor met Powers in 1990, at the Green Street East studio, when he was accosted by a voice that demanded, “Can you not read?” He was making linocuts and, at first, didn’t realise the American twang was directed at him. “Look at the sign and read it,” Powers shouted from the mezzanine above, as she ordered him to follow the many instructions she had pinned up around the studio, and to wash his hands after he had finished. “Suffering fools was never her habit,” notes Lalor, “and the failings of the male sex a constant preoccupation.”
Powers, originally from Minnesota, spent 13 years as studio leader. “Her personality stamped an indelible impression on all who encountered her,” writes Lalor. “However it was also in Powers’ period of leadership that abrasive and confrontational behaviours began to be institutionalized in the Studio, and that contributed to a protracted era of social difficulty and workplace conflict.”
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The book’s title comes from Paul Muldoon’s “love poem” to Powers, written after her untimely death in 1992 at the age of 43, from cancer. In it he refers to “the Black Church clique and the Graphic Studio claque”, the result of the 1979 studio split that led to Powers’ leadership role. No minutes from the meeting have survived, but it is clear that on November 17, 1979, members voted 15-7 not to move to a proposed new premises, an unoccupied church near Parnell Square known as the Black Church. John Kelly, the then studio director, promptly resigned to lead a new printmakers’ group: The Black Church Print Studio (BCPS).
There followed a scramble for the IR£80,000 (€101,500) Arts Council grant that had been promised for the renovation of the church. In the end, neither group got it. Lalor is critical of the Arts Council’s decision to support the breakaway group, which he describes as “a rump organisation of seven people lacking equipment and a studio”. BCPS never ended up in the church either, but retain the reference to the split in their name.
The problem with space at 18 Upper Mount Street had been brewing for a while. With numbers growing in the 1970s, the founder-member Anne Yeats paraphrased her poet father, commenting: “More people, little rooms”. His own line might have been more appropriate: “Great hatred, little room.” Lalor admits that Powers was “tactless and abrasive”, but also praises her unstoppable determination and energy. He cites the newly professional standards of the studio, the Visiting Artists Scheme begun in 1980, and the establishment of the Graphic Studio Gallery (GSD) in Temple Bar in 1988 as her legacy.
In 1983, GSD moved to Green Street East. Seven years later, there was some reconciliation when the group re-opened its doors to Black Church members after an arson attack destroyed their Ardee Studio. But it was short-lived. When in 1992, the Black Church group established their own print gallery “uncomfortably close in Temple Bar”, Graphic Studio tried to prevent its members supplying both outlets.
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With repetitions and admitted omissions, Lalor documents the Graphic Studio as a pioneer of the post-second world war studio printmaking revival. He also charts the seemingly never-ending conflict. From the 1960s there was disquiet over who was chosen for the Sponsors’ Portfolio; as recently as 2001 some members complained about the high-profile Visiting Artists Scheme. More than one member claims the successful 1998 Art into Art collaboration with the National Gallery of Ireland as their idea. Even accounts of the studio’s foundation differ. Lalor cites five founders: Elizabeth Rivers, Anne Yeats, Liam Miller, Leslie McWeeney and Patrick Hickey. And he points out that although constant changes in personnel have been the studio’s Achilles heel, they are also the secret of its longevity.
Clearly, there are still issues: the board of the Graphic Studio are said to have chosen at the last minute not to provide artwork for the book. But Lalor ends on a positive note, the studio’s battle with the Dublin Docklands Development Authority ultimately leading to its long-sought permanent, bright and well-equipped home at Distillery House. Despite the conflicts, the GSD has been a success story. An idea that may or may not have begun with a meeting in Rivers’ Herbert Place flat in 1960 turned printmaking from a marginal to a central discipline, secured its preservation as a fine-art medium in Irish art colleges, and kept ancient traditions alive by ensuring printmaking’s place as a contemporary-art form in Ireland to this day. c
Ink-Stained Hands — Graphic Studio Dublin and The Origins of Fine-Art Printmaking in Ireland by Brian Lalor is published by The Lilliput Press